Speaking with our resident experts on the Kuinua Podcast, John Deverell and Murray McMonies both brought up that Leadership is a lonely place.

Have you ever heard the saying that you can be surrounded by people and still be lonely?

Well it has never been more true that in leadership. For a number of years I ran a huge division of Consultant’s for a pro bono Statistics Company. I had numerous Management Meetings, 1:1’s with my team, Team Meetings and I was always being asked for input to policies and procedures.  Now this might sound really responsible and a real good career but it can, in actual fact, be very lonely. 

1. You can’t always tell your team everything

If you know changes are coming it’s not a good idea to keep updating the team with every little change. The change may or may not be taken on by management and you might cause distress for no reason. For this reason you have to time any intervention carefully when you have as much information as you possibly can get. You need to let the team knwo the risks and benefits so they can be aware of how they would like to proceed individually.

2. You can’t always tell the Management everything

So this is a complicated point. There are some things you manage that the upper management wouldn’t care to know or need to know and there are others that they do. However, dependent on your management, and mine was particularly transient and removed from the actual operations, it can be very difficult to communicate problems. When upper management – or exec boards – don’t have a handle on how things work and they just expect everyone else to ‘do the work’ it becomes tough to have discussions about how their policy causes issues between departments or stops projects. At one point I had to halt all my projects as we had no quality oversight available to check them. At first the Exec just let it ride and then, under pressure, demanded the projects go out without checks. As you can probably imagine, this was around the time that I left because after all the  discussions I had had about ethics, not being misleading or causing an unwarranted impact on societies that may be damaging, this was what was about to happen. As it happened my entire management team also resigned due to the severity of this problem.  One of the problems here is not only communication but political leanings. The Exec was interested in pumping out projects and so tried to ‘convert’ people to that belief. I had a strong team with similar beliefs about societal impact and we didn’t feel the need to play politics around the issue. In summary, upper management did not want to know what was going wrong and neither did they understand how to make it better. This can be a very difficult call on your part and no one can make it but you. 

This is where  a mentor can come in and really help. This is why we set up or Group Mentoring and Executive Leadership Programs, so that we can help you work through these tough, lonely decisions and equip you will the best skills to enhance your leadership decision making. 

So don’t be lonely, join our social media below 🙂

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**Podcast Episodes to Note: Ciccone Prince, Robert Adolph, Ed Pallas, Daniel Lee, Mark Missigman, Dennis Mossberg, Brandon Dohman.

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